The Start of a New Nightmare

It was the pain that woke me. The fat man’s lecture on acute pain had come prophetically true as I slid my hand down towards the burning flesh on my calf. I realised at that point that I had been dressed and I was aware that the material of my jeans was sticking to the raw flesh underneath. I knew I had to pull the denim from the wound and hoped it was still fresh and hadn’t healed too much. Mercifully my clothes were still damp from the soaking I’d had and therefore the material a little pliable. I clenched my teeth and pulled gently. The pain was excruciating as millimetre by millimetre I eased the cloth from the bare wound, as it seemed reluctant to give way. Afterwards I rolled up my trouser leg to my knee to ensure I wouldn’t have to go through the process again.

I lay back and tried to focus for a moment. I was lying on some sort of blanket, on a hard stone or concrete floor and it was pitch black. Where was I?

My leg was throbbing so much, pulsing as if it had a heartbeat of its own and there was more pain as I tried to concentrate on the different parts of my body that were now sending signals to my brain and the receptors in my brain were responding and telling me I was in a bad way. I coughed and another pain shot through my lower rib cage then I felt at my swollen lips and my nose that seemed to be twice its normal size.

I had experienced this feeling once before but this was different because now I was beyond caring. With Kupi and his gang I was always thinking of escape, always determined to beat them and in the end I had succeeded. Every day with Kupi and his gang had been torture related either mentally or physically, sometimes both, but I had tried to remain positive as the weeks passed by. I couldn’t go through that all over again, I knew I would never make it, I didn’t have the strength or the courage. I had used up every bit of resolve within me. I had nothing left, a day or two at the most and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, the Serbian Army or whoever it was who had captured me would break my spirit far sooner that they could ever have imagined.

I lay in the same position for some time and the tears rolled freely down my cheeks and I even recall being annoyed that my body was reacting in that way. I kept wiping the tears with my sleeve and after a while they’d subside and then I’d recall that only a few short hours ago I’d been reunited with my darling parents and then it had all gone horribly wrong and I’d feel sorry for myself and the tears would start all over again.

I could make out the shape of the room. It was so very small and I could just about make out the form of a door as the feint chink of light shined through the cracks at either side. I cautiously stretched out my injured leg taking care that it didn’t touch the face of the woollen blanket. Before I could extend my leg fully it came into contact with a wall. I reached behind me into the darkness and my hand immediately touched the surface of the other wall. My God! The room was smaller than the length of my body. I began to panic. This wasn’t a room. It wasn’t even big enough to be a standard prison cell. Was it a tomb? Had I been buried alive? I jumped up quickly and reached for the ceiling. It was no more than three centimetres above my head. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least I could stand. But my cell was tiny, not much bigger than a small broom cupboard. Surely they couldn’t keep me in here too long?

I paced my cell out, three steps long by two paces wide and just enough height to stand and accommodate my one hundred and sixty centimetre frame. I ran towards the door screaming, banging on the door demanding to be let out. The claustrophobia was worse than any torture, worse than any beating I had experienced.

I hammered on the door until my hands felt like pieces of frozen meat, until I could feel them no more and eventually I collapsed in a heap onto the blanket. I tried to listen between the tears but no one came. I listened for hours, listened for the sound of voices, of vibrations, perhaps a door closing in a distant part of the building but I heard nothing, it was as quiet as an empty Mosque.

I lost all track of time as I cried for what seemed like hours but eventually the panic subsided and I lay in a semi-comatose state. I figured I was in some sort of cupboard with a reinforced steel door and I could now make out the shape of a boarded up grill in the door. I slept. I cried. I slept and cried and every now and again I banged on the door but still no one came.

It’s impossible to gauge time when you have no watch and there is no natural light. The day time becomes night time because it is always dark. As much as I studied the walls and looked to see if there was any change in the light pattern they always looked the same. I started to count to sixty then one hundred and twenty and one eighty and mentally ticked of the minutes in my head calculating an hour and then counted those hours off on the fingers of my hand. As hard as I tried I couldn’t count more than three hours before I fell to sleep.

Each time I awoke the blanket had stuck to my calf and I endured the agony of tearing my damaged flesh from the coarse wool. In the end I took to sleeping on my stomach, which seemed to work and eventually the wound dried. It was still painful to the touch, but bearable. I guessed from the condition of my wound that I had been there at least two days and still no one appeared.

I dreamt that someone had entered my tomb. When I awoke the cell was filled with a beautiful aroma and as I made my way towards the door on my hands and knees I reached out cautiously as I followed my nose and found a bowl of hot soup, a chunk of bread and a bottle of water. I devoured it instantly. The soup was delicious, vegetable of some sort but quite the tastiest soup I had ever had. I realised just how hungry I was as I mopped it up with the dry bread. I even licked the bowl I was so hungry and dehydrated. Afterwards I drained every drop of the water from the bottle. It took no more than a minute and almost immediately I realised how silly that was. My belly was now full but uncomfortably so. I’d gorged myself without even thinking. I hadn’t heard or seen anyone come into my cell. When would they be back?

Several hours later I got the urge to pee. I walked over to the door and started to bang. There was a small grill just above head height that had been blocked with a piece of wood and four vertical iron bars. I eased myself up by holding two of the bars and shouted for help through the crack in the wood. I didn’t expect to get an answer but within a minute I heard two voices on the other side of the door.

“What do you want mother fucker?”

It felt so good to hear human voices again even though I knew how menacing they were.

“The toilet. I need to go to the toilet please.”

“There’s a toilet in there.”

“No there’s not,” I replied.

“Yes there is, there’s one in every corner.”

I heard the sound of the two men laughing and then the sound of their boots walking away on the stone floor. Eventually the sound faded into the distance.

They were right, there was a toilet in every corner so I chose the corner nearest to the door, undid my jeans and peed. I was conscious that my urine ran out from under the gap in the door and outside into the room where the guard’s voices had come from. They would have to clean it up. Perhaps next time they would listen to me.

Within a few days I realised that the food wasn’t so delicious, it was just that I had been so hungry. They brought me something generally twice a day, mostly the same sort of soup. It contained vegetables, usually carrots and potatoes with slices of onions and occasionally it smelled a little like chicken. The first time I smelled the soup I got quite excited and raked through it for the meat but found nothing. For several days I searched for that meat but then gave up realising that it was only the flavour of the powdered stock and not made from any real chicken after all.

Sometimes they brought me bread and butter for breakfast, occasionally there would be a sachet of strawberry jam and that would be all they’d give me until suppertime when the soup would be brought into my cell again. They also brought me a bean broth, chicken flavoured soup filled with beans. My bean broth broke up the monotony of the other soup and I looked forward to it.

But my food pattern was very irregular, some days they seemed to forget about me all together and I remember on one occasion going for two or three days without anything at all. The hunger pains were unbearable.

I think the soldiers had been called away somewhere because during these days there was no sound of any kind anywhere in the building. I dragged my blanket over to the door and sat for hours trying to hear some sort of noise. All I heard was the wind and the rain outside. I convinced myself they had abandoned the building and I would slowly starve to death. That suited me fine, I wanted to die but I confess I was a little frightened thinking what starving to death would be like. I knew it would be a slow, painful process and I began to think of ways I could tear my blanket up into strips and hang myself. That would surely be a better way to go.